You live in a world of social media activity, customer empowerment, and easily accessible and shareable information. Therefore, companies must constantly be aware, vigilant, and empathetic to keep up with that world. You should be aware of any theoretical crisis occurring and empathetic in delivering a response.
Outlining and preparing a plan reduces the response time and improves your approach. The faster you react with crisis communication planning, the better you take control of the narrative and strengthen your brand over the long term. Follow these steps:
Building a team
The crisis management team helps you create and execute the plan. Each member is responsible for a specific role, including informing the employees and establishing a relationship with media outlets. You can also hire crisis communication support agencies without in-house management expertise. Always include a subject matter expert.
Naming a spokesperson
A spokesperson is necessary during a crisis and represents your organisation in the outside world. They help you pass the information to the public, stakeholders, and media, control the flow, and deliver the message correctly and unambiguously.
Anticipating a crisis
You cannot predict the exact crisis to face. However, there are some common scenarios around which you can build your crisis communications strategy. Additionally, you should know your product or service well enough to anticipate possible issues that may arise. What can be helpful in this situation is performing a premortem analysis, identifying the crisis scenarios that might happen, and then treating them as they did happen.
Addressing stakeholders
It is essential to know the people affected by the crisis, whether internal or external staff. Create a list of the people, including the employees, investors, partners, customers, and stakeholders. Inform them of the crisis and adjust your communication strategy accordingly.
Establish crisis monitoring
Some issues you anticipate happening, especially if they are closely related to your product, service, or industry. These problems happen commonly or may have occurred with you before. You can prevent them from reoccurring using social listening and crisis monitoring tools.
Anticipating questions
If a crisis hits your firm, what are the questions you predict? Create a list of each of them with the answers. As a result, you have a set of answers ready when your stakeholders question you. It is an important stage in crisis communication planning. Alternatively, you can use those to set up a website where the public can conveniently find answers to all their questions and all information related to an issue at hand.
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